By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Amen
France, 2002
Constantin Costa-Gavras, Director
The great Japanese film director Akira Kurasawa once said that if he could explain what his movies were about in a few words, he would scrawl them on a placard instead of making the film. Constantin Costa-Gavras has never seemed to have that problem.
The director has always had a polemic side to his films. From Z, his 1969 chronicle of the overthrow of the democratic Greek government, to Missing, a 1982 film about the Chilean junta told as the true story of a conservative American businessman searching for his journalist son in the immediate aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, he has never been accused of subtlety. But whether it is in Music Box, when a beloved father is accused of being a Nazi war criminal, or Betrayed, where a beautiful FBI agent infiltrates the American neo-Nazi movement and becomes romantically entangled with one of her targets, he has also shown that he can successfully juggle the demands of a suspense-thriller and themes of moral ambiguity without resorting to cardboard cut-outs for his characters.
This is why Amen is such a perplexing and ultimately disappointing film. Amen has almost everything going for it: strong acting by lead performers Ulrich Tukur (Kurt Gerstein), Mathieu Kassovitz (Riccardo Fontana), Ulrich Mühe (The Doctor) and Antje Schmidt (Mrs. Gerstein) is uniformly excellent. The cinematography and art direction paint a beautiful backdrop of the horrific events of the “Final Solution” and the progress of World War II. The story itself, based on Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial 1963 play, The Deputy, has all the drama a great director — as Costa-Gavras demonstrably is — could ask for.
The story is important in Holocaust history in that it not only shows that not all Germans were supportive or complicit in Hitler’s crimes, but also the degree to which the international community overlooked the fate of the victims in pursuit of larger goals.
Gerstein was a real-life chemist and SS officer who developed the gaseous Zyklon B for disinfecting barracks buildings and purifying water in the field. When he learned the gas was being used to fuel the death camps, he tirelessly denounced the crimes, yet continued to work on supplying them. Meanwhile, he put himself and his family at risk when he alerted the Allies and the Pope.
Amen’s problem lies in its insipidity. Although the script has Gerstein demonstrating both moral anguish and emotional strains, the presentation does little to help us identify with his agony. The same holds true for the other principal character, the young, well-placed Jesuit diplomat Ricardo Fontana — a fictional character devised to represent the forces within the Vatican that pressed Pope Pius XII to speak out against the Holocaust.
Given Costa-Gavras’ past successes in blending the political and emotional thematic elements, it could be assumed that this film’s banality was his intent. The nagging question left hanging, once the lights come up, is why?